


All the Rest

by CrabWalkTheLine



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, idiots to lovers, lab era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28461063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrabWalkTheLine/pseuds/CrabWalkTheLine
Summary: When rest isn’t restful,when work isn’t working,when contentious isn’t contentment,The literal eleventh hour enriches the figurativeAs heartily as the soil below, above, and withinPompeii loversorHermann and Newt pine for each other like their lives depend on it.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Kudos: 7





	All the Rest

**Author's Note:**

> Working title for this was They’re Pinning and They Were Idiots… oh my god and they were idiots…
> 
> This is my secret santa gift for @newtgottlaid on twitter! Hope you like it, Samara!

That year while the world outside their steel walls and florescent light shrank beneath roaring, bio-luminescent cataclysm, Dr Gottlieb’s lab burned through its solutions to a final resting place of desperation.

Hermann’s muscles ached with rust and his mind drowned in a blaring urgency he stumbled to match pace with as he marched through an itemized list of work that he could never dare finish. If he had not been entrusted with a cocktail of stale exhaustion and nausea, he would have called the product before him a reticent prognostication. But the gelatinous fog around his thoughts only bubbled forward the nomenclature ‘fucked.’

Hermann had stayed rooted while Newton fetched them both dinner. Or breakfast. He felt it dangerous to consider the time too closely, so instead he held eye contact with his calculated prophecy. He dragged his whisped mind’s eye along the fragments of his work, anesthetically traced each mathematical etymology through Babylon, through India, through Berlin, through circa eighteen months ago in this lab’s backwash military town. He listened as Newton set the trays on their desks positioned over the boundary line and huddled around the one good electrical outlet.

That year, while the world outside their acoustic walls and formaldehyde tinted notes acclimated to all the niche devastations his research concluded, Dr Geiszler’s lab had held a three-year long-note in a ballad loosely titled ‘I have nothing outside this and if I don’t give it even more then I never will idk man scientific aside download that word finder app.’ Newt felt the title was a placeholder at best and autobiography title click bait at worst. His artistic integrity, like their multi field lab, unfortunately shared a single power outlet source with the rest of his work ethic and right now his introspection-juice was reserved for renewing his wedding vows.

Soon-to-be wedding vows.

Ostensibly.

Or die trying, as the romantics say.

Newt could chalk himself up as a romantic if he put his mind to it. Yeah.

 _Already_ nailing matrimony compromise.

His English was better than his German, which was better than his math, which was better than his communication skills, so when he placed the food trays on their desks, covered Hermann’s with his leather jacket to trap the heat, and withdrew his vows for their annual polish with… between several to less-than-several-minutes to spare before the new year, Newt did not notice the chalk snap in Hermann’s hand as he strummed out a warm up cord and shouted “Hey Hermann,” Newt held his guitar strings silent to shout across the lab. “What rhymes with parabolic? Auf Deutsch?”

“Adderall.”

“Come ooon.”

“...Pareidolic, I suppose is both a slant rhyme and matches your love language of pretentiousness.”

“Dude, Reime auf Deutsch, bitta.”

“Pareidolic in German is Pareidolic, it still works.”

“Hnnn fiiine. I need to wrap up the German vows and finish my English vows so your work ethic gets a pass. _This_ year.” Newt lamented. He flipped the notebook shut and retrieved a second with ‘english c❤ntingency’ written across the cover in sharp, elongated penmanship. “But for the audience watching at home, my future honey bunches of oats deserves more than ‘works’ and ‘slant rhymes.’ This is why your engagement tally is still in the single digits.”

“I suppose I could always class it up with another dozen fortnight long betrothals,” Hermann drawled. He searched his pockets for a spare piece of chalk and, finding none, glared accusingly at his snapped piece on the floor before descending. He unhooked his cane from the ladder rung and walked heavily toward the food. There was hope that this meal would make the trip down economic enough to justify it to the Triple Event date mounted to the chalkboard, but only a reflexive amount. “Though knowing your appetite for competition, I expect you’d propose to me just long enough to keep me out of the running while you closed the lead.”

The jacket laid across the food released a plum of steam when Hermann carefully lifted and draped it across his own shoulders. The smell of plain rice and vegetables unwound a knot in his jaw. He segregated his vegetables into islands and collected all tomatoes onto his fork. That full mouth bite of tomato had been earned.

“Hermann, if you can’t contribute anything productive or love-drunk, then keep your deal breakers to yourself. I’ve only got--” Newt reached across the desks and clutched Hermann’s wrist, mid bite, to tilt his watch. He tried to tunnel vision his focus onto Hermann’s hand instead of his skipped breath at the site of his own kaiju-blue stained finger tips. It looked like a second skin. He wondered if he could contrive some finger tattoo recover time without slowing his work load. “ Five-ish minutes ‘til midnight to do this annual update. My wedding planner’s future check deposit depends on it.”

Hermann jerked his hand back and pointedly thrust the food into his mouth. He swallowed, dabbed his mouth, and speared more tomatoes off of Newt’s veggie burrito platter. “In _that_ case, why don’t I draft your accompanying prenuptial.”

“ _Duuude_. Don’t be a _diiick_. I gotta get in the heart-eyes zone here.”

Hermann swiped one of Newt’s notebooks and held it out of Newt’s grubby hand reach as he scribbled on a blank page with a puckish smile. “Lets start this itemized list off on the right foot, shall we, all three hundred Hong Kong dollars in your savings--sorry, your tattoo fund jar.”

Newt dropped back into his own seat, plucked out a strum and continued to write out loud. “O-o- _oooh_ , thank you for having meee at myyy  
highest, lowest, quintessentialist,  
A Loudest, nighest, intensivist,  
Your lewdest, honest, lyricist.”

“Two and five eigths of a kaiju 4D print.” Hermann raised his volume. “One pair of military combat boots, sans military, sans combat. One keg of hair gel. One neck tie--caveat, tied in an incorrect knot and fused into place via acidic visceral spray.”

“You say day-ta, I say dah-ta,  
We’ll soar through any strata.”

“Since when do you say dah-ta?” Hermann challenged as he drifted back to his rice. He flattened it into an even, squared layer and pushed to excess to the edge of the plate. “Shall I take initiative and specify that you’ll retain access to descriptive grammar and your future ex soul mate can keep any prescriptive grammar.”

“Hermann, I’ve got all of two-hundred-ish seconds to articulate all the love in my heart gut.” Newt held out his hand for Hermann’s rice as the man reached to push it onto Newt’s plate. Hermann rolled his eyes and redirected the rice into Newt’s palm.

Newt slammed the handful into his mouth and continued, squirrel cheeked. “Make sure you get all my genetic copyrights, too. Can’t wind up in another kaiju clone showdown wif a bitter ex.” Newt struggled to swallow and washed it down with several large gulps from his juice box. “If we can thwart it ahead of time, I mean.” He held out the juice and Hermann accepted.

The straw stopped short of Hermann’s lips as he examined his watch. “Ten seconds, Newton.”

“Fuck! Shit, okay, okay _okay_ , ass-hating mode activated, okay, okay, uhhh,”

“Five, four,”

“Guitar solo!”

“Three, two,”

“ _Excessively_ maverick, _excessively_ phallic guitar solo!”

“One.”

“Done! _Boom_! Happy new year!” Newt cheered, he slam dunked his pen down onto the desk and whooped. “Drink up, Hermann, have an indirect new year kiss.”

Hermann’s face fell humorlessly as he downed the remaining juice, dabbed his lips, and ate his rice and vegetables in rotation. Locked in his peripheral, he watched as Newt reached an arm around the hill of his writing and slide the entire mess into a box at the foot of his desk. Newt stood suddenly, like a spring released, and spun on his heels a full 360 degrees to face Hermann.

“Let’s keep the energy going in the club, come practice the uncle-son wedding dance with me.”

“Are you suggesting I would ever let one of my siblings raise a biologist, Newton?”

“Incorrectamundo, I’m saying I’m banking on being the uncle for your first dance at your wedding.” Newt shuffled from foot to foot to the tune of his own snap and slap beat.

Hermann swallowed his last bite of food, retrieved his cane and rose to return to work. Newt side stepped in front of Hermann with a light bouncing dance and maneuvered in front of the second and third shifts Hermann made to walk around him. Finally, he stopped to consider Newton. Stopped to consider the third element outside the work-not/work binary and sensed the offer of an cathartic lightness neither of them could engineer alone.

“I’ll not allow security to keep you in my venue if you plan to dance like that.” Hermann shot. “Do it properly, or don’t call it practice. Here,” Hermann hung his cane on his forearm then reached for Newt’s shoulder and hip. They angled through the awkwardness toward a functional position with Hermann’s left side weight distributed to his hooked grip upon Newt’s shoulder while Newt’s hands came to support his left hip and rest on his right shoulder.

They inhaled the closeness for a moment, neither prepared to commit to the feeling while the unfinished work in their respective lab corners breathed just beyond the warmth of the other’s exhales. Slowly, indelicately, they allowed one another to experiment with rhythm and began to sway in a lemniscate shape.

Hermann leaned his head above the exposed junction of Newt’s neck. “I’m unsure if I’ll have the confidence, but if my wedding does come to pass,” He mused, relaxed by his perceived inconsequence of the thought. “I am partial to those elegant, satin wedding gowns. Whether it’s worn by my partner or myself, I’d like at least one to be involved.”

“I got you, dude. Contingency plan can be I’ll wear a huge, white, trailing dress to your wedding.

Hermann snorted laughter. “So audacious of you to accept the lime light on my special day.”

“It’ll be my burden to bare.” Newt’s smile rose at the joke, his widened cheeks fixated on its touch against Hermann’s hair, but quickly drooped at the thought as it settled in the air.

“Agreed.” Hermann idly tried to catalogue the spectrum of scent at Newt’s neck. “I don’t think I could picture that day without you upstaging the cantor. Almost makes it not worth the wait…”

“...Why wait?”

Hermann stopped their sway as his chalkboard centered in his vision, just over Newt’s shoulder. The math became a blurred, haloed backdrop as he studied Newt’s concentrated face in the foreground. “We can’t get distracted that easily, Newton.” He murmured.

Newt’s eyes map the scope of color and texture of his kaiju sinew beyond Hermann, a visual cacophony of gestalt and decay, of salted earth, of suicide sacrifice. Hermann cuts an outline before it, a vitruvian man between Newt and detritus. Newt knows, before he can stop the thought, that he can’t protect anyone if he can’t even protect a dream. “It’s not distraction if it can double as motivation.”

Hermann wondered if he was ever able to distinguish motivation from fatigue. He straightened his back and reached for his cane. “We’re wasting time, Newton.”

“Counter point: we have all the time in the world.”

“That’s not funny.”

Newt held still for the first time all night as Hermann used him to balance a stance with the cane. Hermann griped Newt’s shoulder tightly in a flex and shook his head before he let go. Already Newt's shoulder ached for the freedom of that tether, the freedom he last felt in the burning coffee he chugged just after recognizing Hermann in that airport years ago and rising meet him. “You’re not a waste of time.” Newt proposed.

Hermann risked a glance with a look of poorly concealed devastation and felt every kilo of his exhaustion threaten to capsize his resolve. Before the war had torqued from a new frontier to a count down, he had a tailored vision of the recipient of his letters. The Hardy to his Ramanujan. For the first time since that disillusioning afternoon in the airport coffee shop, Hermann no longer mourned that vision. “You’re not a distraction.” He reciprocated softly. “But this work is the only way we can have that future.”

So they leave and work through the night. Starved for consummation, but sated with the weight of their last meal together.

**Author's Note:**

> @GetAlongJaeger on twitter  
> ThisJaegerIsOurGetAlongShirt on tumblr


End file.
